Building Better Citizens

Building Better Citizens
Author: Holly Korbey
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 177
Release: 2019-10-21
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1475843453

Educating for citizenship was the original mission of American schools, but for decades that knowledge—also known as civics education—has been in decline, as schools have shifted focus to college and career, STEM, and raising reading and math scores. But over the last few years, spurred on by political polarization and a steep decline in public understanding, civics education is seeing a nation-wide resurgence, as school leaders, educators, and parents recognize the urgency of teaching young people how America works—especially young people who have been marginalized from the political system. But this isn’t your grandmother’s civics. The “new” civics has been updated and re-tooled for the phone-addicted, multi-cultural, globalized twenty-first century kid. From combatting “fake news” with fact checking in Silicon Valley, to reviving elementary school social studies in Nashville, to learning civic activism in Oklahoma City, journalist Holly Korbey documents the grassroots revival happening across the country. Along the way, she provides an essential guidebook for educators, school leaders and caregivers of all types who want to educate a new generation of engaged citizens at a critical time in American democracy.

American Public Education and the Responsibility of Its Citizens

American Public Education and the Responsibility of Its Citizens
Author: Sarah Marie Stitzlein
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2017
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0190657383

Rather than poorly performing schools, the current educational crisis is really about citizen responsibility. Citizens must insure that democratic processes are nurtured. This is perhaps most achievable in public schools. Therefore, citizens have a responsibility to support public schools and this book offers tools and knowledge to help citizens fulfill it.

What Kind of Citizen?

What Kind of Citizen?
Author: Joel Westheimer
Publisher: Teachers College Press
Total Pages: 161
Release: 2024
Genre: Education
ISBN: 080776972X

"What kind of citizen is no ordinary education book. By drawing on accessible and engaging discussions around the goals of schooling, it is imminently readable by a broad public. Neither fluff nor polemic, the theory and practice described in the book are based in solid empirical research and come out of the most influential frameworks for citizenship and democratic education of the last several decades (the "Three Kinds of Citizens" framework that emerged from collaboration between the author and Dr. Joseph Kahne as well as consultations with thousands of school teachers and civic leaders.) - This framework has been used in 67 countries to help teachers and school reformers think about how to structure educational programs and how schools can strengthen democratic societies. - This book pulls together a decade of research on schools into one place giving the reader a comprehensive look at why schools should be at the forefront of public engagement and how we can make that happen"--

Educating Citizens

Educating Citizens
Author: Patrick J. Wolf
Publisher: Brookings Institution Press
Total Pages: 428
Release: 2004
Genre: Education
ISBN: 9780815795162

The United States is in the midst of historic experiments with publicly funded choice in K-12 education, experiments that recently received a "green light" from the Supreme Court. Other nations have long experience with the funding and regulation of nonpublic schools, including religious schools. This book asks what U.S. policymakers, public officials, and citizens can learn from these experiences. In particular, how do other countries regulate or structure publicly funded educational choice with an eye toward civic values —looking not only for improvements in test scores, but also in tolerance, civic cohesion, and democratic values such as integration across the lines of class, religion, and race? The experience of Europe and Canada with school choice is both extensive and varied. In England and Wales, public school choice is widespread, as parents play a significant role in selecting the school their children will attend. In the Netherlands and much of Belgium, a majority of students attend religious schools at government expense. In Canada, France, and Germany, state-financed school choice is limited to circumstances that serve particular social and governmental needs. In Italy, school choice has just recently arrived on the policy agenda. In spite of the diversity of national experiences, in all of these countries choice is regulated by the government in significant and varied ways to promote civic values. In several of these countries, school choice policy itself appears to have played an important role in promoting social cohesion and integration. This book presents a wealth of experience designed to aid policymakers and citizens as they consider historic changes in American public education policy.

Between Citizens and the State

Between Citizens and the State
Author: Christopher P. Loss
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 341
Release: 2014-04-07
Genre: History
ISBN: 0691163340

This book tracks the dramatic outcomes of the federal government's growing involvement in higher education between World War I and the 1970s, and the conservative backlash against that involvement from the 1980s onward. Using cutting-edge analysis, Christopher Loss recovers higher education's central importance to the larger social and political history of the United States in the twentieth century, and chronicles its transformation into a key mediating institution between citizens and the state. Framed around the three major federal higher education policies of the twentieth century--the 1944 GI Bill, the 1958 National Defense Education Act, and the 1965 Higher Education Act--the book charts the federal government's various efforts to deploy education to ready citizens for the national, bureaucratized, and increasingly global world in which they lived. Loss details the myriad ways in which academic leaders and students shaped, and were shaped by, the state's shifting political agenda as it moved from a preoccupation with economic security during the Great Depression, to national security during World War II and the Cold War, to securing the rights of African Americans, women, and other previously marginalized groups during the 1960s and '70s. Along the way, Loss reappraises the origins of higher education's current-day diversity regime, the growth of identity group politics, and the privatization of citizenship at the close of the twentieth century. At a time when people's faith in government and higher education is being sorely tested, this book sheds new light on the close relations between American higher education and politics.

Citizens by Degree

Citizens by Degree
Author: Deondra Rose
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 313
Release: 2018
Genre: Education
ISBN: 019065094X

Since the mid-twentieth century, the United States has seen a striking shift in the gender dynamics of higher educational attainment as women have come to earn college degrees at higher rates than men. Women have also made significant strides in terms of socioeconomic status and political engagement. What explains the progress that American women have made since the 1960s? While many point to the feminist movement as the critical turning point, this book makes the case that women's movement toward first class citizenship has been shaped not only by important societal changes, but also by the actions of lawmakers who used a combination of redistributive and regulatory higher education policies to enhance women's incorporation into their roles as American citizens. Examining the development and impact of the National Defense Education Act of 1958, the Higher Education Act of 1965, and Title IX of the 1972 Education Amendments, Deondra Rose in Citizens By Degree argues that higher education policies represent a crucial-though largely overlooked-factor shaping the progress that women have made. By significantly expanding women's access to college, they helped to pave the way for women to surpass men as the recipients of bachelor's degrees, while also empowering them to become more economically independent, socially integrated, politically engaged members of the American citizenry. In addition to helping to bring into greater focus our understanding of how Southern Democrats shaped U.S. social policy development during the mid-twentieth century, Rose's analysis recognizes federal higher education policy as an indispensible component of the American welfare state.

Activating the Citizen

Activating the Citizen
Author: J. DeBardeleben
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 317
Release: 2009-08-12
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0230240909

The decline of citizen involvement affects two key elements of democratic government: elections and political parties. Activating the Citizen examines the reasons underlying citizen withdrawal and explores and assesses innovative approaches on both sides of the Atlantic to try to counter these phenomena.

Citizenship, Education and Violence

Citizenship, Education and Violence
Author: Waghid Yusef
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 139
Release: 2013-12-30
Genre: Education
ISBN: 9462094764

The focus of this book is to offer a humane rocesponse to dealing with violence. An interpretive analysis is presented in order to think differently about violence in schools and about how a citizenship education of becoming can deal with the unpredictable consequences of violence in its own potentiality. It seems to the authors that, given the confident onslaught of violence, there is nothing left to do but to offer insight into the nature of violence itself and, by so doing, to search for unexplored ways of humane response and being. The authors are not pretending to hold a magic wand that will sanctify schools into the safe zones that they ought to be and as which they should serve in any society. This would be both presumptuous and misleading. What one is looking and hoping for, however, is a renewed engagement, a slight tilting of the perspective, so that something other than how we have always responded to violence perhaps will emerge. The authors are confident that such a deconstructive approach to violence in schools through the lens of a reconsidered view of citizenship education can assist them and others to wrestle with its potential for destruction that can be changed into options for co-belonging of a non-violent, if not peaceful, kind.